


take me home

by spqr



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Daily Bugle, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Peter Parker-centric, Post-Endgame, Spider-Man: Far From Home (Movie) Spoilers, Tony lives, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, me processing tony’s death 3 mos later
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-07-04
Packaged: 2020-06-09 13:28:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19476856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spqr/pseuds/spqr
Summary: Peter has EDITH sweep the Sanctum for drones and projectors and unknown tech two dozen times before he forces himself to accept the fact that Tony is real.Tony is here. Tony is alive. Tony has been in a magical coma for five years and Dr. Strange never thought to tell anyone. Tony’s going to wake up. Tony’s going to look at Peter and probably smile and maybe even say, “Hey, Pete. Are those my glasses?”





	take me home

**Author's Note:**

> MAJOR FAR FROM HOME SPOILERS!!!

Right after the Blip, Peter tries talking to the school counselor. She’s a nice lady, but she’s frantically overworked and always looks like she’s carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders, and Peter can’t bring himself to add to her burden. So he talks around what’s bothering him, makes it sound like everything is easy breezy beautiful, and only really ends up saying that he lost someone. That he misses him.

“I’m gonna tell you what my mom told me, when my dad died,” the counselor says, smiling a _sorry for your loss_ smile. “Grief is just love with nowhere to go.”

ß

The first Tony Stark biopic is released in October of 2028. Robert Sheehan nabs the titular role, Zoey Deutch dyes her hair red to play Pepper, and the kid from _Everybody Hates Chris_ provides dubious comic relief as Colonel Rhodes. The critics are agog. There are Oscar rumblings from the first screening.

Peter, personally, isn’t impressed. Five years since Tony’s death, and he hasn’t forgotten the exact cadence of his mannerisms, how his lips always froze for a split second before they twisted into a smile, the intensity of his stare—of having all that attention focused on you. Robert Sheehan is a pretty good actor, but he’s a piss poor substitute for the greatest man who ever walked the fucking earth.

The whole time Peter’s in the theater, he wants to stand up and yell at the screen: _I LOVED THAT MAN. I KNEW THAT MAN. WHAT RIGHT DO YOU PEOPLE HAVE TO HIS STORY?_

ß

The school counselor gives him an exercise, in 2023. Every time he wants to pick up the phone and call the person he lost, he’s supposed to make a tally mark in a little notebook. It’s supposed to demonstrate how he can move on with his life without even realizing it, or something.

Only then he’s outed as Spider-Man and he drops out of high school and all of a sudden it’s 2024, 2025, 2026, and he’s still making a half dozen tally marks a day.

He should probably stop. Give up. All it’s doing at this point is showing him how much he’s never, never going to get over losing Tony. He carries his little notebook around and he makes a tally mark every time he sees some street vendor selling bad caricatures of the Avengers, thinking about the dumb string of laughing emojis Tony would send back if Peter texted him a photo, and he doesn’t move on.

ß

Peter munches unhappily on popcorn as he exits the theater after the minimalistically-titled _STARK_ and walks straight into Dr. Stephen Strange. Literally, walks right into him. Popcorn goes flying, Peter goes staggering, Dr. Strange has to reach out and steady him. It’s the opposite of dignified.

Luckily, over the past half decade they’ve developed the sort of relationship where they don’t have to talk about that sort of thing. It’s over, it happened. No use crying over it. Down to business.

Dr. Strange draws Peter away from the front of the theater, into the shadows. His face is as serious as Peter’s ever seen it. In hindsight, Peter would like to be able to say that he knew he was about to get news that would change the course of his entire life, but really he was just trying to get popcorn out of his teeth with his tongue and thinking about how in the movie they’d made Rhodey’s catchphrase _cowabunga!_

“Peter,” Dr. Strange says. “I have to tell you something, and you’re probably not going to believe me.”

 _People will believe anything,_ Peter thinks. “Try me.”

“Right.” Dr. Strange shifts in place, like he’s uncomfortable in his own skin. Maybe he is. He’s wearing civilian clothes. No cape in sight. Which means this is—personal business? A social call?

“Come on, Dr. Strange,” Peter beckons impatiently. “Rip the band-aid off. What is it?”

ß

What it is _,_ is this: Tony’s alive.

ß

Peter likes to think he’s a very self-aware person. He’s a member of the mentally healthy generation, he knows he’s got anxiety and depression and a whole grab-bag of other problems that he’d probably be medicated for if he didn’t have a metabolism that ripped through medication like tissue paper.

So yeah, he knows he has daddy issues. He’s not an idiot.

Not one but _three_ father figures dying on him unexpectedly, and if that’s not enough to make him notice, Quentin Beck goes and exploits the hell out of his blind spot, tap dances his way right into that empty maw in Peter’s heart and takes all that grief-love and points it right at himself. If Peter weren’t so busy feeling like a dumb bitch afterwards, he’d probably think it was pretty messed up.

He just—he wants someone in his life that he doesn’t have to take care of. Doesn’t have to watch out for, or protect, or worry about. Not that he never worried about Tony, just…he always, always trusted that Tony was gonna save the day, no matter what. And some days he really misses having that safety net.

ß

After J. Jonah Jameson outs Peter on national television, nowhere in the world feels safe.

There are reporters outside Aunt May’s apartment and Ned’s house and flocking to Midtown High like vultures picking at a dead body. Happy gives Peter the codes to get into Stark Tower, but even once he’s shut inside Tony’s penthouse, curled up among the boxes of Tony’s old things—the stuff that never made it out to the lakehouse, during the Blip—he feels like someone’s going to find him. Going to get him.

Peter goes digging for some of Tony’s old clothes and finds a baggie of joints in the pocket of an MIT sweatshirt. The stuff has to be three decades old, but Peter’s hands are shaking and everything is too bright and too loud and he can hear the heartbeats of people working in the offices twenty floors down, and he hears this stuff is supposed to calm you down, so he lights a joint and smokes it and coughs and. Breathes.

It’s good but it’s not enough, not with his metabolism. So he takes it down to Bruce’s old lab and laces it with something stronger, just to drown out the noise. Just for a little while. Just so he can sleep.

ß

Dr. Strange explains that Tony’s in a magical coma. Peter sits at Tony’s bedside with his elbows on his knees and his fingers pressed to his mouth, trying not to vomit. He looks so _real_.

“I was able to place his body in stasis, to slow the spread of the damage from the Infinity Stones.” Dr. Strange’s posture is just like doctors in TV shows, and to Peter he sounds a million miles off, like he left the 24thseason of _Grey’s Anatomy_ playing in the other room. “Think of it like cryostasis, without the freezing. He hasn’t aged a day since the battle with Thanos. None of his body processes were active while he was under.”

Peter swallows around the lump his throat. “So why did you wake him? Why now?”

“I found a solution. A way to keep the damage isolated indefinitely.” Dr. Strange crosses to Tony’s bed and moves the covers so Peter can see Tony’s chest. “A sort of magical arc reactor, if you will.”

It does look just like the arc reactor. Only it’s square, and it glows orange.

Suddenly Peter can’t stand to stay seated. He jolts to his feet, resisting the urge to flee the Sanctum and New York and maybe Earth. “Does Pepper know?” he hears himself ask. “Colonel Rhodes?”

Dr. Strange frowns. “I sent Bruce to talk to Pepper,” he answers slowly, sounding confused by the abrupt change of topic. “I was going to go see Rhodes myself when I’m done here—”

“I’ll go,” Peter stutters out. “I’ll, uh, I’ll get Rhodey, you just. Just. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I have to go.”

And he runs.

ß

The thing is: _Tony’s dead._ Peter knows it with every atom of his being. He reminds himself of it every time he takes out his little notebook and adds another tally mark to the literal _thousands_ of tally marks that are already there cluttering the pages, his legions of six-times-daily reminders. _Tony Stark is dead._

ß

Bucky Barnes saves Peter’s life, pretty much.

A few days after the reveal, Aunt May answers a knock at the door to find Bucky on the other side. She ushers him in and Peter makes him a cup of cocoa and they all try to act like it’s not super weird that the Winter Soldier is sitting on their floral-patterned couch, holding a mug that says _That’s no moon._

After a few minutes of stilted small talk, Bucky clears his throat. “I, uh. Natasha left me something when she died, but I think you’ll get better use out of it than I ever will, so. Here.”

He holds out a thin slip of translucent fabric. Peter stares at it awkwardly for a second until he realizes Bucky wants him to take it, at which point he scrambles and almost succeeds in dropping it on the floor. Bucky catches it and hands it back to him with a chuckle. “You’re a lot more graceful on TV, kid.”

“Yeah,” Peter laughs nervously. “Sorry. Uh, what…what is this?”

The fabric moves like water over his fingers, and he thinks when it catches the light at the right angle he can see some sort of nanites embedded in the weave. “It’s a mask,” Bucky says. “You can program whatever face you want into it, go completely incognito. Figure that might be something you’re interested in.”

Peter, to his absolute and eternal embarassment, tears up a little. “Yeah,” he says again. He swears he’s usually more eloquent than this. “Yeah, thanks, Mr. Barnes. I’m. Thank you, really. Thanks.”

Bucky smiles gently. “Don’t mention it, Peter.”

ß

Pepper attends the premiere of _STARK_ in a floor length midnight black gown with her wife on her arm. Maria Hill, since that whole thing with the Skrulls, has gone domestic; she poses for the cameras, wears a pantsuit like most people wear battle armor, and swoops Pepper into a kiss at the end of the red carpet.

Peter watches a few of the interviews Pepper does about the movie, about her decision to sign off on the rights to Tony’s life story. She says she’s honoring his memory, honoring the fact that he always did love a good circus, that he would have been tickled pink at all the wild inaccuracies.

He knows she’s right, but all Peter wants to do is reach through his computer screen and shake her and demand _how could you? how could you just hand him over to them? hasn’t he given them enough?_

Demand _how did you do it? how did you get rid of this ugly, possessive jealousy? how did you move on? please please please please please teach me._

ß

“How did he make you feel?” the school counselor asks. “How did you feel when you were with him?”

Peter sits there in her cubicle staring at her _Hang in there_ cat poster with a feeling too big for his body, trying to find a word that means safe and seen and loved and understood and protected and happy, and he thinks maybe trying to boil Tony Stark down to words in the English language is a fool’s errand, like trying to wrap your fist around water, around a lake, around the whole damn ocean.

ß

Peter has EDITH sweep the Sanctum for drones and projectors and unknown tech two dozen times before he forces himself to accept the fact that Tony is real. Tony is here. Tony is alive. Tony has been in a magical coma for five years and Dr. Strange never thought to tell anyone. Tony’s going to _wake up_. Tony’s going to look at Peter and probably smile and maybe even say, “Hey, Pete. Are those my glasses?”

The rest of them take it all in stride.

Pepper and Maria bring Morgan down to the city with a smooth lie about visiting Uncle Happy, Rhodes settles in next to Tony’s bed with an absurdly thick New Avengers expense report and a red pen and goes through circling and crossing out and muttering _cowabunga_ under his breath like an expletive. It’s like they’ve done this before. Like they always expected him to come back.

Peter suddenly feels like a kid again, struggling to get his emotions in check.

He goes digging through the Sanctum’s kitchen and finds a mug that fills itself with coffee without any apparent mechanism, something that breaks his science brain clean in half and makes him want to call Tony and say _tell me everything you know about interdimensional science._

He reaches for the notebook in his back pocket to make a tally mark, and freezes with it in his hand. Does he even need it anymore? Tony’s upstairs. _Tony’s upstairs_. He can just…talk to him.

Staring at Tony asleep like that, with the unfamiliar orange glow at the center of his chest, Peter can’t shake the feeling that he’s going to melt away into pixels and tricks of the light and Quentin Beck’s laughing voice. But he does his best—he sips coffee from the impossible mug and tells Tony all the reasons it shouldn’t be able to do what it does, barely even noticing Rhodes watching him over the top of his glasses.

ß

Once the world knows who he is, all his senses ramp up to eleven.

Seeing as ten is already a hundred times more sensitive than the average human, eleven is pretty fucking awful. He feels like he’s always on the alert, watching for supervillains in line at the deli, alien invasions on the L, Doombots while he’s sitting for his GED.

He can’t exactly go to the doctor and ask for something to calm him down. Whatever they proscribed, if they were even willing to proscribe Xanax to Spider-Man, wouldn’t work. So he custom designs himself a drug that dulls his senses enough for him to get a few hours of jittery sleep a night.

It’s the best he can do. He feels like he’s coming out of his own skin, like he’s hearing things, and the only way he can get to sleep at all those first few weeks is webbed to the corner of the wall and the ceiling in Tony’s penthouse, listening to EDITH recite perimiter checks.

The smoke from his designer drug is bitter and stings his sinuses, but it helps him learn not to cry.

ß

College is off the table. He could build himself a third identity and enroll with the mask on, sure, but the thought of having to maintain all that makes him feel sick.

He can’t exactly get a job delivering pizza, either. So he designs a superstrong cable based on his web fluid and sells it to Oscorp, because Pepper’s already letting him squat rent-free in her tower—he can’t exactly ask her to _pay him_ on top of that. When he’s between projects he sells photos of Spider-Man to _The Daily Bugle_ and doesn’t even feel too slimy about it. Money is money is money. Right? 

ß

Peter’s not in the room when Tony wakes up. He’s playing Battleship with Bruce in a room that Dr. Strange insists on calling the ‘solarium,’ watching the Hulk struggle to make his big fingers pick up the tiny pieces. He snorts a laugh. Bruce shakes his head and says, “Laugh it up, fuzzball.”

Peter grins. “That makes me the wookiee, right? And you know what they say—”

He cuts himself off, senses picking up the change in the Sanctum. The patter of multiple sets of feet moving toward one room at the same time, the whisper-quiet shift in Dr. Strange’s magical monitoring equipment, the rebirth of a heartbeat he never thought he’d hear again. His eyes sting.

“Peter?” Bruce is saying. “What is it?”

ß

What it is, is this: Tony’s awake.

ß

Peter hears later from various reliable sources that the first thing Tony said when he woke up—after he threw up and wiped his mouth and looked at Pepper’s wedding ring and Maria’s wedding ring and Morgan sitting eight years old at the end of his bed—was, “Ruined you for other men, huh, Pep?”

ß

Sometimes Peter thinks the worst thing about Tony’s death was that he didn’t crack a joke while he was going. There was no last witticism, no parting advice, no smug self-satisfied smile, no _Bet you can’t out-sacrifice me this time, Cap._ He just wheezed and bled and clung to Pepper and…went.

Peter hears that wheezing in his sleep, still. Sees the Iron Man suit, ripped to shreds and exposing the burnt, twisted flesh of Tony’s side, and thinks that wheezing is breath moving through his exposed ribs like wind, the tissue of his lungs flapping uselessly, and wakes up and makes another tally mark.

It’s just—in life, Tony was always so cool about everything. He stared death in the face and said _You need a breath mint_. He’s the reason Peter slings quips the same way he slings webs.

And Peter thinks he knows what it’s like to be Tony Stark, now. He knows that humor is just a coping mechanism for getting through the day, like his notebook and his designer drug and how he sometimes blasts Led Zeppelin in the lab so he can imagine Tony’s still there. But in the quiet moments, when he’s at his lowest, he hears that wheezing and he thinks none of it matters in the end. Nothing can save us, in the end.

ß

Peter swings around Manhattan for a few hours before he’s calmed down enough to see Tony.

He tiptoes into the room with his mask in his hands, thinking Tony’s asleep again until he turns to press a kiss to Morgan’s forehead and blinks up at Peter. Morgan’s asleep against Tony’s healthy side, the one that doesn’t still look like really unhappy tree bark. “Hey, Pete,” Tony says tiredly.

Peter falls into the chair at his bedside like a puppet with his strings cut. “Hey, Mr. Stark.”

They stare at each other for a long moment, neither of them quite sure what to say, and Peter has a terrifying moment where he thinks that it’s all ruined. They’re never going to get it back.

Then Tony extricates his good hand from Morgan and reaches out to Peter. Peter lunges forward and takes it, forgetting for a moment that he should be careful with Tony, who was in a coma for five years and just woke up and could disappear at any—but Tony’s grip is strong, and warm, and so so good.

“You okay?” Tony asks, forehead creased in concern. “Pete, you seem—”

“I’m fine,” Peter says, too quickly. “Really, Mr. Stark. It’s good to have you back.”

Understatement of the fucking century, but Tony’s daughter is curled up against his side and there’s some sort of _magic_ embedded in his chest keeping him alive, and Peter’s not going to overburden him by spilling his own problems like some sort of emotionally immature toddler. He’s okay. He’s fine. Really.

ß

Later, he’s in the room underneath Tony’s, and he hears him and Rhodes talking. Tony’s saying _seems different, I don’t know_ , and Rhodes replies _been asleep a while, Tones. He grew up._ There’s a minute of quiet, and then Rhodes adds _might want to take a look at The Daily Bugle, that should clear it up._

A few minutes later, there’s a crash and an explosion of swearing, and Peter rushes upstairs to find Tony red-faced and near tears, his StarkPad in a million pieces on the floor.

ß

Peter knows what it’s like to be Tony Stark, now, because _The Bugle_ prints a hundred heinous lies a day and MJ couldn’t handle the stress of dating a superhero and there’s a Spider-Man biopic but it’s not called _PARKER_ , it’s called _ATTACK ON LONDON._ The other Avengers made public statements denouncing Mysterio’s claims, but it’s hard to put a cat back in a bag once it’s out. Impossible, actually.

The press called Tony ‘The Merchant of Death’ when he had an entire PR team to fight it, and Peter—well, Peter’s just one guy, and it’s a whole new fake news world. There’s not a whole lot he can do.

ß

 _Heavy lies the head that wears the crown,_ Fury-Talos said, and he was right.

If Tony were younger and hipper, he might’ve gone with _It’s lonely at the top_. Peter’s pretty sure it means the same thing: You’re standing on a platform a million miles above the earth and you look down, and the whole world is looking back up at you, and they see you, they know your name and they think they know your story, but no one’s up there with you. No one’s saying, _I know the truth, Peter Parker._

Plenty of people are calling him an idiot and telling him what they think he should do but none of them are listening to him, none of them want to hear what he has to say, and he thinks he understands now why Tony always acted first and asked for forgiveness later.

ß

Tony finds Peter on the roof of the Sanctum, breathing bitter smoke into the cold November air.

“ _Peter_ Parker,” he says, appropriating the joint. “I am _stunned._ Absolutely stunned. Marijuana? I mean, I know it’s legal in the state of New York, but a goodie two shoes like you?”

Peter appropriates the joint right back. “That might be too strong for you, Mr. Stark.”

Tony looks offended. “I get that I was dead, kid, but haven’t you heard?” He taps the orange glow at the center of his chest. “I’m magically fortified now. Completely unkillable.”

Peter snorts. “I don’t think that’s what Dr. Strange said.”

“Unkillable,” Tony insists. “Plus, I’ve been smoking weed since before you were born.”

Peter takes a drag and breathes out a thin stream of smoke. It barely even makes his eyes water anymore. “Not weed,” he says. “It’s…I made it. For when my senses get too…overwhelming.”

Tony’s gaze turns soft. “Pete—”

“I, uh,” Peter interrupts clumsily. “I wanted to give you something.”

He pulls the little notebook out of his back pocket and hands it over. Tony flips it open immediately, thumbs through the pages, frowns when he realizes they’re all covered in tally marks, five years written in pencil nubs and waitresses’ pens and whiteboard markers. “What’s this?” Tony asks. “Modern art?”

Peter laughs, but it feels like gravel in his throat. “It’s—well, my guidance counselor, back in high school, she said it was a way to deal with grief. With losing someone. Every time I wanted to pick up the phone and call you, I put a mark down. It was supposed to help me visualize moving on, or something.”

Tony’s flipping through the pages more carefully now, with something like reverence on his face. His bad hand shakes. Peter’s hit with a tidal wave of embarrassment. “Sorry, I—”

“No, don’t be,” Tony swallows. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for, Pete. Never.”

ß

Peter never does get that break. First there’s summer vacation and Mysterio, then there’s figuring out how to keep Aunt May and Happy out of harm’s way, then there’s the whole thing with the Skrulls and trying to figure out how to lead the Avengers when he’s fucking seventeen and scared out of his mind, then there’s Norman Osborn and Green Goblin and a lot of days when Peter feels like Tony screwed up, picking him.

He tries taking a vacation, once, in the only place it seems like he can escape to, anymore—outer space. The Guardians and Thor are nice enough hosts, but they’ve got about a hundred bounty hunters on their tail at any given moment and the whole thing devolves pretty quickly into chaos.

What he’s really trying to escape, if he’s honest with himself, are the murals of Tony that keep popping up when he least expects it. But Tony saved the whole universe. There are murals of him everywhere.

ß

 _Grief is just love with nowhere to go,_ and Peter wants to ask: is the love specific?

Is it love that’s meant for Tony alone, or is it just love? Could he find someone else to pour it out on, or is it gonna be stuck inside him forever, wanting Tony until the day he dies? Because, honestly, he doesn’t know. He can’t know, because MJ dumps him and Ned goes to college and all he ever talks about with the other Avengers is what’s going to try and end the world next, and no one says _I know the truth, Peter Parker._

Not even Aunt May. Because she’s really cool with the whole Spider-Man thing, and she gives him the space he needs and never freaks out about him almost dying, but eventually that translates into a strange sort of distance where they never talk about what really matters, they just discuss which donuts are the best in Queens and whether it’s weird to put Happy on the Christmas card and Mr. Delmar’s new kitten.

She treats him like an adult, and he is—he’s an adult. But sometimes he wants someone to make him cocoa and wrap him up in a hug and give all that love somewhere to go, just for a few minutes.

ß

 _I’m fine_ , Peter tells Tony, mostly because he’s not really sure how to be anything else.

He’s got this deep well of _not fine_ in his chest and it’s been boarded over for years and he’s not sure what would happen if he pulled the nails up and looked inside. _Not fine_ is something you get to be when there’s someone there to pick up the pieces, and Peter’s tired of picking up his own pieces. So he’s fine.

ß

It’s 8:38 A.M. when he finds Tony in the Sanctum’s kitchen. He remembers the time, later, because for some reason it strikes him as odd that his entire carefully constructed act comes apart while the rest of the city is on their way to work, to school, listening to J. Jonah Jameson yell in the car. 

There are two self-filling mugs of coffee on the island. Tony’s waiting for him, standing with his arms crossed, one hip leaned against the counter. “I’m no good at this,” he tells Peter.

Peter stops in his tracks. He’s wearing pyjama pants and a Black Sabbath t-shirt that he salvaged from the boxes in the tower, and he has the sudden, awful thought that Tony’s about to tell him to quit being so clingy. Even though he hasn’t been clingy at all. He hasn’t overburdened anyone. He’s _fine._

“Good at what?” he asks, dumb.

Tony comes around the island to stand in front of him. He doesn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, which is—wildly out of character. “Apologies,” he says. “I’m no good at apologies.”

Peter’s heart seizes. “What?” he asks again.

“I’m realizing now, in hindsight, that I might’ve left you with a little too much responsibility.” Tony meets Peter’s eyes, and the intensity of his focus is too much. It’s gonna break Peter apart. “Okay, a lot too much responsibility. I still think you were the right choice, but it was shitty of me, and I’m sorry.”

“Um,” Peter says, for lack of something better. “I’m.”

He can feel the well starting to break in his chest, crumbling away like so much dust, and he shakes his head and feels tears in his eyes because he _can’t._ He can’t fall apart, he can’t he can’t he can’t. He’s been keeping it together since he was sixteen, and he’s _fine now_. Really. Really really really.

Only Tony says, “Fuck, Pete, I’m so sorry.”

And the walls fall away and the whole fucking ocean rushes out. Tony pulls him into a tight, bracing hug, and Peter buries his face in his shoulder and comes apart with that feeling he couldn’t put a name on in the counselor’s office, grief and love and _exhaustion_ , and Tony just holds him through it.

ß

They decide to share EDITH. Peter thinks he didn’t even realize how much weight he was carrying around until Tony takes half of it back, until Tony puts on the glasses and sees that Peter changed the acronym to ‘Even Dead I’ll Throw Hands’ and laughs and laughs and laughs.

ß

Tony takes it upon himself to sue the shit out of _The Daily Bugle_ and the people who made _ATTACK ON LONDON,_ and Peter lets him because he figures Tony has to learn for himself that it’s a losing battle.

The inaccuracies and artistic liberties in _STARK_ do, indeed, tickle Tony pink, and he takes great pleasure in shouting _cowabunga!_ every time Rhodey enters a room, which surprises exactly no one. The unadulterated joy on his face almost makes Peter tear up a few times, which is so heartbreakingly pathetic that he has to slip out unnoticed and tell EDITH to turn off the cameras in the hall until he gets a hold of himself.

Watching Tony crash into 2028 with no preparation and no brain-to-mouth filter isn’t the prettiest thing in the world, but Peter gets it. He Blipped. He came back and found someone else’s shit in his locker, and maybe that’s not quite the same as finding out your wife has her own wife, but it’s probably close enough.

ß

Peter still reaches for his little notebook sometimes, when he sees a kiosk selling underwear with Captain America’s face on the crotch. He still finds himself watching Tony and Morgan from across the room and recognizes the _outside looking in_ feeling in his chest as nostalgia. He still wakes up in the middle of the night jittery and oversensitive and has to web himself to the corner of the ceiling to calm down.

But Tony pulls him aside and says, “I’m gonna tell you something I wish someone had told me a lot sooner than they did. You don’t have to do this alone, Pete. I’m with you.”

**Author's Note:**

> me, projecting onto poor unsuspecting peter parker for 5,000 words: cowabunga!


End file.
